


Vague and Dissolute

by adnauseam



Category: Dark Matter - Michelle Paver
Genre: Comes Back Wrong, Grief, Not A Fix-It, Post-Canon, Trauma, Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-19
Updated: 2018-12-19
Packaged: 2019-09-23 02:30:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17071784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adnauseam/pseuds/adnauseam
Summary: Something was coming.





	Vague and Dissolute

**Author's Note:**

  * For [within_a_dream](https://archiveofourown.org/users/within_a_dream/gifts).



> I was scrolling through the sign-ups and couldn’t resist your suggestions, within_a_dream! I hope you’re having a lovely Yuletide.
> 
> Title taken from the poem September by Michael Field (Katherine Bradley & Edith Cooper).
> 
> Many, _many_ thanks to Karios for looking this over.

 

_He hung suspended in the water. Very slowly something was leaving him. He turned incrementally without noise until he was facedown and his unblinking eyes stared at the blackness. Something was leaving him._

_His mouth opened and the ocean came rushing in. Underneath him something heaved past, formless, darker than the black surrounding him. His lungs were salted, his blood rusted, he drifted downwards._

_Something had left but his body had some sly animal awareness left. It did not attempt to move; it was dragged along by the current and felt the power of the pull, dropping all the while. What awareness it did still have was lodged at the first knob of his spine._

_The cold had seeped into all his clothes, was in everything. It slid and chafed against his skin; it wanted to be let in. It was too cold to be cold: it was as limitless as the ocean and it had time. It might be months before the first sharks reached him, but the blood was in the ocean now, a small trickle from his neck; he would be torn apart and the cold would come in until there was nothing but the cold but the cold._

_The last semblances of something were leaking from the back of his neck into the ocean and that animal awareness, so far removed from his brain, was dulled, was gone into the blackness. He drifted down._

 

“Jack, you’re still shaking,” Algie said uncertainly.

Jack sat huddled in several layers of blankets and overcoats and tried to think past the falling sensation in his throat. Did not reply. Isaak worried at his hip.

“I didn’t want to come at first,” Algie said. The way he stopped he seemed to want to go on, but he did not. Jack stared at the floor.

“Jack,” Algie said.

 

_And on that ocean floor something was growing in his gut and along his spine but it was not the same something that had left. It gripped dead muscle and it crept along nerves and it slunk through his bloodstream to the heart._

 

Jack lay in his bunk and stared up at the yellowed ceiling. With every lurch of the ship he thought he might be sick. It was so hard to feel present. His head was full of radio static with clustering thoughts strung through the bone: he should not have let them come, it had been so close, he should have swallowed his pride and just _left_ , he had had enough chances after all, it had been so close, reaching his hand out for Gus and feeling nothing nothing _nothing_ but freezing water, being dragged back out onto the boat, meeting Algie’s eyes, knowing that it was over.

 

_Something was gathering up inside him. It had stolen through his body and now it solidified like molten lead around his muscles and clenched. The tendons in his body were like wires. From far away there was pull, a tug, some sort of violent lurch and the compulsion to move rose up his spine. On the ocean floor in the dark he twitched._

 

Suddenly some urge was over him and he ducked out of his bunk and began to pace, restlessly, only his feet weren’t cooperating and he stumbled, letting out a noiseless breathless shout of pain, and was on the floor. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. What was that, he thought. There was no question in it. He could feel his heartbeat rabbiting in his chest, his throat, his stomach.

He took another breath, shaky. Pushed the heels of his hands into his eyes. Fucking hell.

He rested his head on his knees and could see the pale olive pieces of Gus’s clock, lying shattered on the floor.

 

_His clothes were tattered and the cold was coming in. There was an echo of grief in his chest. One of his hands rose and clenched in the silt._

_There was little feeling in him but purpose. With sickening effort his arm was bent and it heaved him forward._

_With every drag strength coalesced in his limbs. His hand was struck against the pit of the earth again and again as if it was raising something from below._

 

Jack shivered and looked about him. Everything was very grey, peeling. It was so _noisy_.

Algie stood beside him, standing oddly solemn and shuffling his feet. An irrational surge of frustration and thick loathing coursed through him. It was undeserved but still his head drew up and his jaw firmed and he strode off the ship and onto the land.

The absence beside him gasped for breath, he could feel it, tingling in his side, gaping, watching. He wanted – he _wanted_.

 

_There was something in his brain and it sat there and leered while something behind his ribs threw itself against that wall with a thud, sliding down defeated every time but too desperate to stop._

 

He didn’t have the energy to sit upright. He leant against the window and watched the drab countryside roll past. It had been cold enough in the morning for frost, so the fields were full of crusty, icy mud – such strange patterns, like waves or sand. It was very dreary, he thought. He had become used to the extremes of Svalbard, the immensity of the landscape, and of the ocean; in comparison this was horribly enclosed, cramped, and there was nothing magnificent in the bleakness of the colouring.

He pressed his face against the glass and sighed. He hadn’t the patience to read, but he wasn’t restless enough to jitter, so he sat, collapsed into himself, and drifted. Bone tired.

Not wanting to have the memories slither over him, he kept his eyes open. Black birds against a grey sky. Trees still mostly bare; it was a harsh spring. They stood stark like bronchioles against the swell of the bank.

He knew that Gus must have made this journey dozens of times, visiting his family. He wondered if Gus had taken this train, if Gus had sat in this compartment, if Gus had sat where he was sitting. When he sank into the seat he thought he could feel residual warmth. And then he could feel Gus everywhere, and he had to close his eyes against it, for fear of looking across the compartment and seeing him stare back.

What expression would he have? He wanted to picture something kind, at least, but all he could see, burnt against the back of his eyelids, was the look in Gus’s eyes when he had gone over: just fear and nothing else.

The train juddered and shuddered against his forehead, his mind splintering; a fuzzy sort of hurt swirling up from somewhere. This was a sort of being alive. Moving. Pain.

 

_This newly recovered strength coiled up inside him and his hand dug into the silt with rising viciousness._

_The darkness was pressing down on him, deafening. The urge to move was uneasy._ _It felt alien, too large for his own feeble organs, too red for his blood, too brittle for his bones. It bristled._

 

Gus’s mother was faint and insubstantial in the morning room, nodding away at things, writing letters. Those first few weeks she wore the same expression, no change, just that blank, understanding frown. _It must have been awful for you_ , she would say. _Just ghastly._ There was nothing he could say back.

Whenever he passed her on the stairs or in the hall – she never stayed in one room long and neither did he – there would be jolt, a hurtling paralysing drop in his stomach. He dreaded it. At least Gus’s father grieved openly. They were so kind to him, he would remind himself daily. So kind.

 

_Distantly, something in him was howling against the compulsion. Didn't want it. Wanted to stop, to rest, but still he was dragged along the ocean floor by his own hands. At the base of his skull, odd crackling whispers._ _And behind his ribs the emptiness of hopeless fear._

_And so he was hauled through the motionless dark._

 

He woke disjointed in the throat of the dark, at odd angles under the sheets, fire still grasping for him in some flickering palimpsest over the stale black of the bedroom. He felt very small in the cavern of it, burning cold all over. His left foot that was not there felt shrivelled, dark rotting poison. He curled up tighter, but his skin scraped raw and frozen over the mattress as he moved, and he made some small noise in hate of it. He wanted to be rid of it, he wanted it all to be gone.

 

_The ocean above him was thinning, the sea floor sloping. He would have been able to see light, distantly, had he been able to look above. But he could not. He was kept close to the silt. One hand after the other. Another. Another._

 

“Gus,” said Mrs Balfour. She was sitting straight-backed as the soup was brought out.

Jack and Mr Balfour turned to her but said nothing. The silence stretched and stretched, became a tangible presence in the room with long, long arms reaching.

She blinked. “He always did love this time of year – the walled garden. Badgers.”

Something twisted in Jack’s chest.

Unexpectedly Gus’s father laughed, huge and hearty. “Remember, Grace – the time with old Hugh and the boots, when Gus—"

 

_His hands were closed over rock. Sharp. Jagged. He was dragged out of the sea and onto the land._

_Beneath his feet the mud was cold. At his neck, rain slithered. The air was thin and bitter, moving in sly, shifting patterns across his skin. He staggered, he slipped, his feet resettled. Lopsided his head rose._

 

Some days felt like walking daydreams, like sleepwalking, moving insubstantial into rooms and after some time leaving them. There was little conversation to be had – very little of anything to be done. He could not concentrate.

Most of what he did remember came seeking for him in the night, and it came with claws. He would feel crushed, lying on the bed struggling to breathe naturally, the same old pathways trodden enough to become tiresome, weighted, as his mind scrambled to reconstruct all that he had seen, and all that had been done. He could not tear his mind away.

But he was determined that he would remember more of Gus than just the end, that he would preserve those first few weeks in Gruhuken, that Gus’s memory would not be consumed by dread. And so thinking of Gus became necessity and torture both.

Or at least at first. As the world turned relentlessly on, he would think of Gus and feel nothing but creeping unease.

He would wake into darkness, jolted out of the dream, disoriented, uneasy. One time he realised that he had forgotten how Gus walked, and could not shake the image of him in the dream, lumbering and swaying too lightly on the snow.

 

_Time was absent; he stumbled across the sodden, scratchy grass with no real consciousness. The desperation beneath his ribs was bursting, heavy and screaming and growing in awareness, but the purpose that compelled him across the fields and along the narrow, thickly hedged lanes was something else, something with no name. It held victory in its grasp and it shone in his head and in his shoulders with a dark light. It could not be touched._

 

He woke and grief was thick in him; he rolled over and it hung above him; he went towards the window and that dark curtain blocked out the sun.

In the drawing room he could see the outline of Gus on one of the chairs and without pause he turned and walked back towards the hall, leant his forehead against the wall, and breathed in very slowly. When he went back in there was nothing, but the image was imprinted against his eyelids and he couldn’t shake it off.

 

_Closer and closer and that howl from beneath his ribs grew taut. Sharper. Beneath his ribs there grew a yearning._

 

It happened by the river.

He was there for no particular reason. It was late spring, but more drizzling than warm; the grass was sodden and limp and the bank slippery with mud. He was supposed to be leaving for Jamaica soon, or soon enough, and he knew that he should be feeling at least something about it, but he was not.

He was standing with his hands in his pockets, watching the moorhens poking about and the tadpoles wriggling in the slimy slow water, and struggling to find anything to think about when he felt it.

A sudden jolt in his stomach, twisting to spark along his spine, and suddenly everything snapped into distinctiveness: the trees on the other side of the bank drawn in jagged, haggard lines, straining their arms towards him; the water no longer just dull and muddy – it squatted in the ditch with determined malevolence, it refused to move, sullen; the sky peeled itself, the bland grey turning over at the corners, darker clouds coalescing and as he stared up at them they bulged towards him.

Any semblance of a breeze was gone. It was very still and silent. He listened.

He knew then that something was coming.

 

_His flesh was unfeeling. Above him the sky reeled, swinging from light to dark, blind drunk, minutes or hours or days or weeks lurching ever onwards._

 

It was nothing but the sly plucking of the rain at the window, but the hairs on the back of his neck were rising anyway. He pulled himself away from that dark hole of a view and started up the stairs. Hesitant. His body was screaming at him to look behind him, just once, just once to check; but he held himself rigid and refused – if he did, he knew that he would be unable to stop looking. Besides, he was not at all sure that there was nothing there.

 

_Nobody saw him. Not up close. England was shut up behind walls._

 

He stood at the back door with the darkness close to him and watched the horizon, watched the moon as it swung up from behind the earth. He was waiting for something, he knew not what. Or did he?

Beneath his skin, something crept and jittered. He felt like breaking into hysterics. What was happening to him.

Only – the moon was swollen and yellow and scabbed and the air was clear, coloured dark blue, and the land before him stretched out flat and hard to the edge of the world, with only small, clumped blotches of trees to disturb the clean sweep of it, and something was stirring in that air, he could feel it waking. So he waited.

 

_He had been unthinking but now he thought:_ please. Please. _The flat of the land swelled ever so slightly to a curve._

 

When Gus came back, Jack was sitting on a low wall on the edge of a copse watching the sun as it sank.

The night was unearthly still and already dark blue; the sun had little impact. Jack saw Gus as he loped over the brow of the rise and he sat and watched complacently as if it were a dream or a delusion. He knew it was Gus. Expressionless, Gus picked his way across the stream and in that odd half-walk lumbered up to the wall. Unblinking.

“Hello,” Jack said.

 


End file.
